A Corpus-based Study On The C-E Translation Of Culture-loaded Words

Culture-loaded words refer to words or phrases that have specific cultural connotations in a national culture.They symbolize the unique things in the given culture and load with the cultural style of that nation.However,the uniqueness and complexity of culture-loaded words have brought many difficulties and problems for translators owing to the dramatic differences in natural environment,religion,custom,cultural image between Chinese and western.In recent years,the translation of culture-loaded words has become one of the hot topics in translation field.Besides,to study their English translation is an indispensable part in the process of spreading Chinese culture.This thesis chooses the culture-loaded words in Red Sorghum as the research objects.Through quantitative statistics and qualitative analysis,this paper aims to investigate the translation of culture-loaded words in modern and contemporary Chinese local novel.The three questions to be addressed include: what are the general features of culture-loaded words' usage in both the source text and the target text;what translation methods does Howard Goldblatt employ to deal with the culture-loaded words in Red Sorghum;and how skopos theory is reflected in the translation methods adopted by the translator.Firstly,the thesis screens out and categorizes the culture-loaded words in the source text based on Nida's classification to culture and the text features of local novel.After the categorization,the culture-loaded words will be automatically marked by BFSU Qualitative Coder 1.2.Secondly,the Chinese and English parallel corpus of Red Sorghum is compiled and used for retrieving the marked culture-loaded words with the aid of SDAU ParaConc.And then to quantify the number and frequency of occurrence of culture-loaded words as well as the translation methods adopted by the translator for different culture-loaded words and in different contexts.Thirdly,based on the above statistics,the author tries to exemplify and analyze the translation methods under the guidance of the skopos rule,the coherence rule and the fidelity rule of skopos theory.The research results are as follows.First,there are 545 culture-loaded words in Red Sorghum,which can be classified into ecological,material,social,religious and linguistic culture-loaded words.The translation of these culture-loaded words shows distinct translation features.Besides,the number and frequency of occurrence of the culture-loaded words in the version are basically consistent with the source text.Second,the translator adopted 10 methods to translate those culture-loaded words,such as literal translation,free translation and substitution.Third,seen from the skopos theory,the amplification and the deletion are under the skopos rule.The free translation,substitution,literal translation plus intratextual gloss,transliteration plus intratextual gloss and synonymy are under the coherence rule.The literal translation and transliteration are under the fidelity rule.The corpus-based method in the thesis could enrich the research paradigm of translatology.Moreover,the tagging rules designed in this study are intended to provide an annotation scheme for the subsequent researches on culture-loaded words in literary works.This study is hoped to help more people realize the importance of culture-loaded words' translation.Thus,the literary translation can better play its role in the cross-cultural communication and do its bits for spreading Chinese culture.